Africa/Global: The Right to Food

Editor's Note

"The right to food is the right of every individual, alone or in
community with others, to have physical and economic access at all
times to sufficient, adequate and culturally acceptable food that
is produced and consumed sustainably, preserving access to food for
future generations. ... Because of the various channels though
which access to food can be achieved, the creation of decent jobs
in the industry and services sectors plays an essential role in
securing the right to food, as does the provision of social
protection."- Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Final Report

Olivier De Schutter, the Special Rapporteur, goes on to note in his
report that "Measured against the requirement that they should
contribute to the realization of the right to food, the food
systems we have inherited from the twentieth century have failed.
Of course, significant progress has been achieved in boosting
agricultural production over the past fifty years. But this has
hardly reduced the number of hungry people, and the nutritional
outcomes remain poor."

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from this report. The
full report, and a wide variety of other reports from De Schutter's
six years in his position, is available at
http://www.srfood.org/en/

The report provides a very clear summary of the major issues
affecting achievement of the right to food, including not only
models of agricultural production but also the broader economic and
social policies in both advanced and developing economies affecting
people's access to food.

Other recent reports on strategies for food security include

(1) The annual Global Food Policy Report from the International
Food Policy Research Institute (http://www.ifpri.org/gfpr/2013).
While continuing this mainstream organization's focus on expanding
agricultural production, this report also stresses the need for
social protection-led and nutrition-led interventions targeted
directly at hunger and undernutrition, based on experiences in
countries such as Brazil, China, Thailand, and Vietnam.

(2) An October 2013 report from ActionAid
(http://www.actionaidusa.org/publications/feeding-world-2050)
challenges the assumption that the principal solution to food
security is simply producing more food. "Rising to the Challenge:
Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050" stresses the need to
shift from large-scale fossil-fuel-based agriculture to support for
sustainable production by small-scale farmers.

(3) The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's annual State of
Food Insecurity (http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/) noted
that some 842 million people, or roughly one in eight (in SubSaharan
Africa one in four), suffered from chronic hunger in
2011-13. It also stresses that macroeconomic growth and production
gains would not be sufficient to address the issue, unless growth
was widely shared and advances targeted at the poor.

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De
Schutter

Final report: The transformative potential of the right to food

United Nations A/HRC/25/57

General Assembly

24 January 2014

[Excerpts only. The full report, including footnotes, and a wide
variety of additional reports and resources, are available at
http://www.srfood.org/en/]

II. The diagnosis

2. The right to food is the right of every individual, alone or in
community with others, to have physical and economic access at all
times to sufficient, adequate and culturally acceptable food that
is produced and consumed sustainably, preserving access to food for
future generations. Individuals can secure access to food (a) by
earning incomes from employment or self-employment; (b) through
social transfers; or (c) by producing their own food, for those who
have access to land and other productive resources. ... Thus, the
normative content of the right to food can be summarized by
reference to the requirements of availability, accessibility,
adequacy and sustainability, all of which must be built into legal
entitlements and secured through accountability mechanisms. The
Special Rapporteur's country missions have been situated within
this analytical framework.

3. Because of the various channels though which access to food can
be achieved, the creation of decent jobs in the industry and
services sectors plays an essential role in securing the right to
food, as does the provision of social protection. The right to food
overlaps in this regard with the right to work and the right to
social security, guaranteed under articles 6 and 9 of the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. ...

4. Most stakeholders agree, in general terms, on the urgent need
for reform. Measured against the requirement that they should
contribute to the realization of the right to food, the food
systems we have inherited from the twentieth century have failed.
Of course, significant progress has been achieved in boosting
agricultural production over the past fifty years. But this has
hardly reduced the number of hungry people, and the nutritional
outcomes remain poor. Using a new method for calculating
undernourishment that began with the 2012 edition of the State of
Food Insecurity in the World report, United Nations agencies
estimate hunger in its most extreme form to have decreased globally
from over 1 billion in 1990-1992, representing 18.9 per cent of the
world's population, to 842 million in 2011-2013, or 12 per cent of
the population. However, these figures do not capture short-term
undernourishment, because of their focus on year-long averages;
they neglect inequalities in intra-household distribution of food;
and the calculations are based on a low threshold of daily energy
requirements that assume a sedentary lifestyle, whereas many of the
poor perform physically demanding activities.

5. Calorie intake alone, moreover, says little about nutritional
status. ... Too little has been done to ensure adequate nutrition,
despite the proven long-term impacts of adequate nutrition during
pregnancy and before a child's second birthday, both in low-income
countries where undernutrition is the major concern and in middleand
high-income countries. ...

6. The exclusive focus on increasing agricultural production has
also had severe environmental impacts. The twentieth-century "Green
Revolution" technological package combined the use of high-yielding
plant varieties with increased irrigation, the mechanization of
agricultural production and the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers
and pesticides. Thanks to State support in the form of subsidies
and marketing, this was effective in increasing the production
volumes of major cereals (particularly maize, wheat and rice) and
of soybean. The Green Revolution was an attempt to meet the
challenge as it was framed at the time: to ensure that increases in
agricultural productivity would match population growth and the
dietary transition facilitated by rising incomes. It led, however,
to an extension of monocultures and thus to a significant loss of
agrobiodiversity and to accelerated soil erosion. The overuse of
chemical fertilizers polluted fresh water, increasing its
phosphorus content and leading to a flow of phosphorus to the
oceans that is estimated to have risen to approximately 10 million
tons annually. Phosphate and nitrogen water pollution is the main
cause of eutrophication, the human-induced augmentation of natural
fertilization processes which spurs algae growth that absorbs the
dissolved oxygen required to sustain fish stocks.

7. The most potentially devastating impacts of industrial modes of
agricultural production stem from their contribution to increased
greenhouse gas emissions. Together, field-level practices represent
approximately 15 per cent of total human-made greenhouse gas
emissions ...In addition, the production of fertilizers, herbicides
and pesticides, the tillage, irrigation and fertilization, and the
transport, packaging and conservation of food require considerable
amounts of energy, resulting in an additional 15 to 17 per cent of
total man-made greenhouse gas emissions attributable to food
systems.

The resulting climate changes could seriously constrain the
potential productivity of current agricultural methods. ... Under a
business-as-usual scenario, we can anticipate an average of 2 per
cent productivity decline over each of the coming decades, with
yield changes in developing countries ranging from -27 per cent to
+9 per cent for the key staple crops.

8. The Special Rapporteur has shown that, partly as a result of
climate change, but also due to unsustainable and destructive
fishing practices and distorting subsidies, the productivity of
global fisheries as a source of food is declining (see A/67/268).
The unsustainable production of meat is another area of concern. An
FAO study, prepared in advance of the High-level Expert Forum on
How to Feed the World in 2050, estimated that annual meat
production would have to reach 470 million tons to meet projected
demand in 2050, an increase of about 200 million tons in comparison
to the levels of 2005-2007. This is entirely unsustainable. ...
Continuing to feed cereals to growing numbers of livestock will
aggravate poverty and environmental degradation.

9. Globally, livestock production employs 1.3 billion people and
sustains livelihoods for about 900 million of the world's poor. As
a major source of protein intake, meat and dairy production is a
potential component in tackling undernourishment, and there are
sustainable modes of meat production. But in high-income countries,
the net health impacts of meat consumption are turning negative: at
current levels, it is contributing to chronic diseases, including
obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Moreover, the industrial model of cereal-fed livestock production
as well as the apparently limitless expansion of pastures is
creating problems that must be addressed urgently. In 2006, FAO
estimated that grazing occupied an area equivalent to 26 per cent
of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet, while 33 per
cent of total arable land was dedicated to feedcrop production -
maize and soybean in particular. Thus, livestock production
accounted for 70 per cent of all agricultural land and 30 per cent
of the land surface of the planet, and the expansion of pastures
and feed crops is a major source of deforestation, especially in
Latin America. The FAO study estimated that the livestock sector
was responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions
measured in CO2 equivalent - a larger share than transport. ...

10. Finally, because global food systems have been shaped to
maximize efficiency gains and produce large volumes of commodities,
they have failed to take distributional concerns into account. The
increases in production far outstripped population growth during
the period from 1960 to 2000. But these increases went hand in hand
with regional specialization in a relatively narrow range of
products, a process encouraged by the growth of international trade
in agricultural products. The associated technological and policy
choices concentrated benefits in the hands of large production
units and landholders at the expense of smaller-scale producers and
landless workers, resulting in the growth of inequality in rural
areas and a failure to address the root causes of poverty.

Of course, there were important evolutions throughout the period.
The 1960s and 1970s were characterized by a State-led type of
agricultural development, under which governments, eager to provide
urban populations with affordable food or to export raw commodities
in order to finance import substitution policies, either paid
farmers very low prices for the crops produced or supported only
the largest producers who could be competitive on global markets,
thus accelerating rural migration. In the 1980s, the introduction
in most low-income countries of structural adjustment policies
resulted in a retreat of the State from agricultural development.
It was anticipated that trade liberalization and the removal of
price controls would encourage private investment, making up for
the reduction of State support. Overproduction in the highly
subsidized farming sectors of rich countries put downward pressure
on agricultural prices, however, discouraging the entry of private
investors into agriculture in developing countries. If there was
private investment at all, it went to a narrow range of cash crops
grown for export markets.

11. The consequences are well known. Because small-scale farming
was not viable under these conditions, many rural households were
relegated to subsistence farming, surviving only by diversifying
their incomes. Others migrated to the cities, a rural exodus that
in Africa accounted for at least half of all urban growth during
the 1960s and 1970s and about 25 per cent of urban growth in the
1980s and 1990s.

At the same time, the dependence of low-income countries on food
imports grew significantly. Many of the least developed countries
are still primarily agricultural, yet, in part because they have to
repay their foreign loans in hard currency, they export a narrow
range of commodities and therefore find themselves highly
vulnerable to price shocks on international markets for these
products. Their food bills have soared - the combined result of
population growth and a lack of investment in local agricultural
production and food processing to meet local needs. ...

12. Indeed, many least developed countries have succumbed to a
vicious cycle. As they were confronted from the 1960s to the 1990s
with strong population growth and rural-to-urban migration, their
governments had no choice but to depend more on food aid or to
import more food products. This made it even more difficult for
their own farmers to make a decent living from farming, as they
faced increased dumping of heavily subsidized foodstuffs on
domestic markets. In effect, the import of low-priced food products
functioned as a substitute for improved wages for workers in the
non-agricultural sectors, and for the establishment of social
protection floors for all. ...

III. What food systems are expected to deliver

13. There is broad agreement on the diagnosis summarized above.
Indeed, it is this diagnosis that explains the major efforts to
reinvest in the agricultural sector in low-income countries since
2008, to do so in a more sustainable way, and to take nutrition
into account in agricultural policies. These efforts include
significant increases in public budgets dedicated to agriculture,
encouraged for instance by the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture
Development Programme under the New Partnership for Africa's
Development (NEPAD); increases in the share of development
cooperation budgets going to agriculture, through bilateral and
multilateral channels; initiatives such as Scaling Up Nutrition;
and the renewed interest of the private sector in agricultural
investment. However, while governmental and non-governmental actors
agree on the need for reform, disagreements persist on the way
forward.

14. Many view productivity improvements in agriculture as key to
addressing hunger and malnutrition. This approach is still as
influential today as it was in the 1960s, in part because of
increasing demand for agricultural production (for both food and
non-food uses) and the anticipated further increases as a result of
population growth, higher incomes, and shifting diets linked to
urbanization. Thus, FAO estimated in 2009 that a 70 per cent
increase in global agricultural production was required by 2050 in
comparison to the levels of 2005-2007, taking into account an
annual average growth in gross domestic product (GDP) of 2.4 per
cent between 2030 and 2050 and assuming that about 290 million
people would still be undernourished by 2050. This estimate was
widely cited to justify investments in technology-based solutions
to respond to a challenge presented as a primarily quantitative
one.

15. Given the threats that food systems face, particularly those
linked to climate change and soil degradation, and given the
potential of productivity improvements to raise the incomes of
small-scale food producers, investments in raising productivity are
needed. However, a narrow focus on improved productivity risks
ignoring the wide range of other variables that foresight exercises
should take into account. Moreover, the deeper debate concerns not
whether productivity should be raised, but how to achieve this.
Increasing yields alone will not do. Any prescription to increase
yields that ignores the need to transition to sustainable
production and consumption, and to reduce rural poverty, will not
only be incomplete; it may also have damaging impacts, worsening
the ecological crisis and widening the gap between different
categories of food producers.

...

IV. The interdependence of reforms

32. There is a connection between the obstacles faced by low-income
countries in their attempt to improve their ability to protect the
right to food of their populations, and the need for reform in
middle- and high-income countries. While a number of reasons
explain the lack of investment in food production to satisfy local
needs - including in particular the burden of foreign debt (which
leads countries to focus on cash crops for exports) and the often
weak accountability of governments to the rural poor (A/HRC/9/23,
para. 17) - the addiction to cheap food imports is also caused by
massive overproduction in better-off exporting countries, which is
stimulated by subsidies going to the largest agricultural producers
in those countries, and which ensures access to cheap inputs for
the food processing industry. And it is facilitated by the growth
of international trade and investment and the corresponding
increase of the role of large agribusiness corporations in the food
systems.

33. This is the interdependence of reforms. While the rebuilding of
local food systems in developing countries is vital to expand
opportunities to small-scale food producers and, at the same time,
to improve access to fresh and nutritious food for all, it depends
fundamentally on the reform of food systems in rich countries. Such
reform faces significant obstacles, however. ...

Even without taking into account the subsidies for the consumption
of fossil fuels by agricultural producers, countries of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development subsidized
their farming sector to the amount of $259 billion in 2012. This
has encouraged the expansion of the food processing industry,
thanks to the availability of cheap inputs and the deployment of
infrastructure - in the form of silos and processing plants - that
has been shaped by and for agro-industry. Large agribusiness
corporations have come to dominate increasingly globalized markets
thanks to their ability to achieve economies of scale and because
of various network effects. In the process, smaller-sized food
producers have been marginalized because, although they can be
highly productive per hectare of land and highly resource-efficient
if provided with adequate support, they are less competitive under
prevalent market conditions. The dominant position of the larger
agribusiness corporations is such that these actors have acquired,
in effect, a veto power in the political system. Finally, the
habits of consumers themselves have changed: in high-income
countries, the consumption of highly processed, high-energy (though
nutrient-poor) foods has increased year on year, becoming an
accepted, unquestioned part of modern life.

...

V. The way forward

35. Nevertheless, the Special Rapporteur believes that change can
be achieved. Actions should be launched at three levels to
democratize food security policies, thus weakening existing lockins
and allowing these policies to shape the new model that he
calls for.

At the local level, the key to transition is to rebuild local food
systems, thus decentralizing food systems and making them more
flexible, but also creating links between the cities and their
rural hinterland, for the benefit both of local producers and of
consumers.

At the national level, in addition to support for locally-led
innovations, multisectoral strategies should be deployed. Such
strategies should trigger a process in which progress is made
towards supporting a reinvestment in local food production, focused
in particular on small-scale food producers in the countries where
they represent a large proportion of the poor; towards the
diversification of the economy, to create opportunities for incomegenerating
activities; and towards the establishment of standing
social protection schemes, to ensure that all individuals have
access to nutritious food at all times, even if they have access
neither to productive resources nor to employment.

At the international level, greater coordination should be achieved
between actions launched at the multilateral, regional and national
levels, with a view to creating an enabling international
environment - rewarding and supporting domestic efforts towards the
realization of the right to food rather than obstructing them. At
each of these levels, the right to adequate food has a key role to
play to guide the efforts of all actors, to ensure participation of
those affected by hunger and malnutrition, and to establish
appropriate accountability mechanisms.

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